


Nights

by AuroraExecution



Category: X-Men: First Class (2011) - Fandom
Genre: Bittersweet, Emotional Hurt, Feelings, M/M, Painfully In Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-22
Updated: 2013-03-22
Packaged: 2017-12-06 02:30:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 327
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/730556
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AuroraExecution/pseuds/AuroraExecution
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They can't reconcile their beliefs, but they won't let go.  This is the story of Charles and Erik told by their nights.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Nights

**Author's Note:**

  * For [jazzedforthefall](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=jazzedforthefall).



> jazzedforthefall has been the most amazing RP partner I could ask for. She's got stunning grammar, picks up my threads and gives me responses I can really work with, knows the characters really well, and writes like a boss. In between RP lines, she puts up with my ranting, randomly fangirls with me, /gets all my references/. I can't even describe how lucky I've been to have her to RP with, and this drabble was inspired by the continuity we've sort of built up recently.
> 
> For those of you who aren't jazzedforthefall, the premise of this continuity goes like this: after the beach, Charles and Erik find themselves drawn together again and again, and end up maintaining a long-distance relationship of sorts.

In the dark, Charles is languid on the bed. 

It’s frightening how close this feels to domesticity, and painful how much it isn’t. 

They have a pattern, now, in which Erik appears and they share an evening that lives in its own little bubble—it’s not the ideal solution they would have liked, or the life they would have chosen, but the important part is that they have each other still.  Emma calls it compartmentalizing, but Erik disagrees.  He doesn’t call it anything, really.  It’s simply that he can’t have Charles at his side and won’t live without him. 

They fight, often.  Charles hates many of Erik’s actions, and Erik hates some of Charles’s choices.  Sometimes Erik thinks this is just how they love.  They fight, and yet when the world falls to pieces, Erik finds home in the arms of Charles Xavier.  He only hopes it’s the same the other way around. 

The nights they don’t fight tend to be desperate.  One of them almost always has to leave in the morning, and there’s a reluctance to let go from both of them.  Their moments are brief, stolen from fate’s tightly clenched fist.  It makes them willing to forget their differences, for the short instants they share, but it also indelibly tints the encounters with mortality. 

And then there are nights when they cling tightly to each other, but between them is an impenetrable wall.  The divide between their ideologies limits the things they are able to share, so all they can do then is hold on and project all their love, and hope it’s enough.  Sometimes it isn’t. 

Some nights, though, they are happy.  Some nights the bubble stays whole, and Charles is smiling broadly in the dark, relaxed enough that his mind floats quietly, half-entangled with Erik’s.  Some nights Charles rolls over and Erik can only think of the way Charles will smile in the morning when he wakes up still in Erik’s arms. 


End file.
